Long before she earned a doctorate or joined a university faculty, Dr. Tina Facca-Miess kept a quiet vision of how her personal faith and professional purpose might one day intersect.
That vision grew stronger when Facca-Miess became Boler College of Business Associate Professor of Marketing, and recognized the power of John Carroll’s deep Jesuit principles and Ignatian pedagogy to make a difference in the lives of the marginalized.
The vision grew a little stronger still when she set her academic focus on researching and writing about how people forced into migration and other marginalized people can leverage community-level research methods and social innovation to improve their lives.
The personal and professional finally met in a full embrace for Facca-Miess this past September when she represented John Carroll University at the Refugee & Migrant Network International Conference in Rome. Beyond the impact of meeting and learning alongside the world’s leading refugee advocates, Facca-Miess joined her fellow attendees in a private audience with His Holiness Pope Francis.
“The idea that my work and my life might one day lead to an audience with the Pope has been with me since my early 20s,” said Facca-Miess. “I’ve been all over the world, but I had never been to Rome because I always wanted to be invited.”
Facca-Miess recalls placing an image of the newly elected Pope Francis waving to the crowd from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on her phone screen saver on Wednesday, March 13, 2013. Now exactly 9 years, six months, and 16 days later, she was shaking the hand of the man she calls “God’s best friend on earth.”
“I kept that one image on my phone for so long,” she says. “It was a quiet vigil. I think now I’ll put the picture of me shaking his hand. He was right there. It was a very, very humbling experience. And, you know, I can just still feel the shake of his hand. It was really, really a special blessing being in a small group of people being blessed by Pope Francis for very specific work in a very specific way.”
Pope Francis had offered a detailed message to the world community, including governments everywhere, just four days earlier (September 25, 2022) on the occasion of the 108th World Day of Migrants and Refugees.
The Pope’s remarks came as the human community marked an unfortunate milestone: the number of people forced to flee conflict, violence, human rights violations and persecution had crossed the staggering figure of 100 million for the first time on record, propelled by climate disasters, the war in Ukraine and other conflicts.
His Holiness remarked: No one must be excluded. God’s plan is essentially inclusive and gives priority to those living on the existential peripheries. Among them are many migrants and refugees, displaced persons, and victims of trafficking. The Kingdom of God is to be built with them, for without them it would not be the Kingdom that God wants. The inclusion of those most vulnerable is the necessary condition for full citizenship in God’s Kingdom.”
Facca-Miess was joined at the Pontificia Universita Gregoriana in Rome by her recent global collaborators — a group that includes several governments and leading NGOs, a major research firm along with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Together, they have launched Voices of Refugee Youth, an education and research project focused on Rwanda and Pakistan.
Facca-Miess presented a big piece of her contribution to the conference, something called the Integrative Justice Model (IJM). “The model is an ethical framework through which researchers can amplify the voices of consumers in marginalized contexts and provide data-driven recommendations to create transformation in quality of life,” she explains.
It’s not lost on Facca-Miess that Pope Francis called for this very type of approach, one that places the human rights and dignity of all migrants at the center of all interventions. Voices of Refugee Youth and Integrative Justice Model (IJM) represent a larger trend in higher education toward inter-agency and institutional collaboration to provide education that is scalable and rooted in empowering the most marginalized with solutions of their own making.
In the Pope’s words: “Building the future with migrants and refugees also means recognizing and valuing how much each of them can contribute to the process of construction. I like to see this approach to migration reflected in a prophetic vision of Isaiah, which considers foreigners not invaders or destroyers, but willing labourers who rebuild the walls of the new Jerusalem, that Jerusalem whose gates are open to all peoples.”